Seagate Touts 2TB Hard Disk Drives, SSDs for Next Year.

Seagate Technology, the world’s top supplier of hard disk drives (HDDs), has promised to release a 2TB (2000GB) hard drive sometime in 2009. In addition, next year the company will release solid state drives (SSDs) for enterprise customers who can pay extra cost per Gigabyte, but need to lower power consumption of servers and decrease cost of ownership.

William Watkins, chief executive officer at Seagate, said in an interview with IDG News Service that 2TB hard drives from the world’s largest maker will be available in 2009, but remained tight-lipped about the details and technical specifications of the forthcoming products, which is understandable.

Seagate’s SSD would be mainly for data centers that rely on processing data quickly, like indexing servers or search servers, that can temporarily store data until it is ultimately moved to permanent storage on hard drives or tape. Solid-state drives can move data up to 10 times quicker than hard drives, but data has to ultimately be moved to larger and more reliable storage, according to Mr. Watkins, who does not believe that SSDs will hardly become popular among consumers shortly from now and will actually become widespread even on the market of enterprises.

“SSDs are not price-competitive yet. The storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won’t be in laptops in the next few years. Low-power consumption capabilities and high speeds make SSDs useful for laptops, but the cost-per-gigabyte won’t come down at least for the next few years,” said Mr. Watkins.

Seagate has been skeptical about SSD technology publicly, however, the fact that it is actually coming to market with flash-based storage does indicate that the company has certain hopes for the market of solid state drives.